Matt: Okay. Welcome back to another episode of Publish & Prosper, where I'm not gonna tell you what episode number it is. 

Lauren: It's a mystery. 

Matt: That's right. We're not doing that anymore. 

Lauren: Or you could just look at the show notes. 

Matt: Yeah. I don't remember why we decided, but we're not doing that anymore. 

Lauren: In case we needed the flexibility 

Matt: That's right.

Lauren: Of moving episodes around. 

Matt: Perfect. 

Lauren: Because we have done that a couple of times where we've decided they fit better in a different order. 

Matt: But I will tell you, we're almost at 100. 

Lauren: We are almost at 100. 

Matt: Yeah, so.

Lauren: Getting closer and closer every day. 

Matt: Yeah. You do the math. Today we're gonna be talking about magazines. Magazines have, I think, experienced a huge surge as a product over the last probably year and a half, two years, maybe a little bit more. Definitely after COVID around 2021-ish. Late 2021, 2022, we started seeing a lot of different magazine projects coming through and then… There's always been a few that have been on our platform for a while, but it's a product that's really taken off and a lot of people are using it for a lot of different things. And then some things, they're doing magazine format, but maybe it's a catalog or something like that. But nonetheless, as a product type magazines, I think, are having their heyday right now and we felt like we'd be remiss not to talk about it. We actually love magazines. 

Lauren: Yeah, absolutely. I wanna point out that if you immediately started listening to this and said, well, I don't publish magazines. How is this relevant to me? We're not just talking about magazines as what you think of as a print magazine. We're talking about the product type in general.

Matt: Right. 

Lauren: And we think there's actually a lot of cool ways that different types of creators can use a magazine product. 

Matt: Yep. 

Lauren: To support their business, to support their customers, subscribers, fans, whatever. If you don't think this is for you, I challenge you to listen to the rest of the episode and see if you're not convinced by the end that maybe it is actually a good fit or something that you might not have thought about before, but could be a good way for you to present your content or support your audience or anything like that.

Matt: I swear we're a professional – 

Lauren: I know. 

Matt: I've got sounds going off on my computer. My cell phone's over here like, vibrating me out of the chair. Apologies. 

Lauren: This is actually just so on par with how everything else has gone so far this morning.

Matt: I'm also trying to have better posture so I can be up at your height level.

Lauren: I'm gonna like, slink down – 

Matt: No don’t – 

Lauren: No? 

Matt: I don't, I don't want you to –

Lauren: Okay. 

Matt: – to sacrifice your posture, cause you have excellent posture. 

Lauren: Thank you. 

Matt: I actually feel at the right height now. 

Lauren: I do feel like we're eye level right now. 

Matt: Yeah it's different. 

Lauren: Yeah. 

Matt: I don't know if I like it yet. I'll let you know in a little while.

Lauren: Would it help if I get some like –  

Matt: Nope. 

Lauren: Okay. 

Matt: Don't do anything. 

Lauren: Okay. 

Matt: I need to have better posture, and this is just an incentive to do that. 

Lauren: All right, well I'm here to help you out with that. 

Matt: So I don't feel like I'm sitting at the kids' table anymore. I can actually be eye level with you. 

Lauren: Let's rewind. We are so professional. This is a professional podcast. 

Matt: Yes. Yeah. 

Lauren: Created and produced by a professional brand. 

Matt: This one will probably be highly edited or not. It doesn't matter. 

Lauren: Who knows? 

Matt: I think along the lines of what you just said, you were saying that there's probably people listening that are like, ah, I don't care about magazines, I'm gonna turn this episode off. I agree with you. Like I would challenge people to listen to this and, I think there's a lot of cool and creative ways to use magazines, magazine products. Also, a lot of what we hear when we talk to people about these products before they hear everything we have to say or they get to see the different uses of it. What we also hear is, why would I do a print magazine? Surely people who read magazines, they're digital consumers. They're used to short form content and lots of visuals, which typically these days means digital. My counter to that is, I think that that is part of why magazines are having a resurgence right now, is I think people want more tactile stuff.

Like vinyl made a resurgence. There was something like…until maybe five or six years ago, there were only like two big plants left in the world that produced vinyl records. 

Lauren: Really? 

Matt: And now there's five more that have opened in the, last couple of years because of the resurgence of it. People just like having things in their hand. They like things that they can collect or show to people or… And just like other print, I think magazines, especially nicer ones or some are more like quarterly magazine journals or things like that where they're, thicker paper for covers and nicer stuff. I think part of that is just people like that experience of having something in their hands. That's why print and that's why magazines. 

Lauren: Yep. 

Matt: So. 

Lauren: Well, and also, I don't wanna disregard the point that we've made repeatedly in the past, that I think it's very relevant in this episode. Magazines are a lot easier, or print in general, is a lot easier to reference — 

Matt: Sure. 

Lauren: – than digital content. 

Matt: Sure. 

Lauren: Depending on how you're using it. But like, some of the things that we're gonna talk about, like one of the samples that we have here is a travel planner and travel guide. And sure. Digital content for that is great, but especially like some of these, like this is a guide to Hawaii. If you're on a trail, if you're on a hike, on a trail. That was recommended in here, and you don't have any service on your cell phone. That digital guide isn't gonna get you very far. But this print guide that you stuck in your backpack –  

Matt: Well also – 

Lauren: – will absolutely help you.

Matt: – the fact that Hawaii is obviously surrounded by water. The island itself has a ton of water, or the islands themselves all have–I'm not sure I wanna be carrying around my iPad or my Kindle or whatever it is you're… I don't – 

Lauren: Yeah. 

Matt: – I don't think those things work very well once they've been submerged in water.

Lauren: No, they do not. I do not recommend that you jump off a waterfall – 

Matt: Not that a magazine necessarily does. But I wouldn't feel as bad if I dropped my $10 magazine in the water. 

Lauren: I don't know, I think this could be okay. We could toss it off a waterfall and find out. 

Matt: That means I get to go to Hawaii –

Lauren: Yeah.

Matt: – to try this, then absolutely. 

Lauren: I've heard of worse reasons. 

Matt: I agree, yeah. So some things we're gonna cover in this episode. Obviously, the benefit of them, how to use them, how to create them. Why print-on-demand obviously is the perfect model for magazines. You might have digital content already that would make a perfect print magazine.

We'll talk a little bit about that and then, again, we'll talk about how to use the magazine product type as a way to support your business, your brand, or anything else that you're trying to further with creative efforts. 

Lauren: Sounds good. 

Matt: Okay. I just wanna make sure you're on board with that. 

Lauren: I'm so on board with that.

[6:28] - Why print magazines are having a comeback moment

Matt: So magazines historically have been very similar to books in the sense that they're always printed in big bulk runs. Offset print – twenty, thirty, forty thousand, sometimes more – at a time, just depending on the magazine circulation rate, how many subscribers they had, how many retail stores they also needed units, copies for. It was always a high volume, bulk purchase type scenario. Of course, when you're doing that, all money is either due upfront or net thirty days when you're dealing with printers, so. Most magazines were all consolidated under a few holding groups, there's a company that owns ten of the most top rated magazines right now. So it was a lot like books, and to that degree, as people started going more digital and reading more digital things. Less short form content was being consumed in print, only long form survived, I think, some of that print winter. I think magazines, a lot of them just fell by the wayside. When you have those types of costs that are associated with carrying a magazine every month, unused or unsold issues are warehoused or pulped. It's just not a sustainable model. Now that it has a resurgence and there's obviously new technology, there's better ways with print-on-demand to do these things. I think that helps just like with books in general. So I think it's a lot easier to create and distribute magazines right now. 

Lauren: Yeah. I didn't really think about this until you were just saying that, but when we're talking about magazines, if the first and only thing coming to your mind right now is like trashy, pop culture, magazines – 

Matt: Cosmopolitan.  

Lauren: Cosmopolitan. People, whatever. Like, sure. That is a type of magazine. But there are also a lot of other types of magazines out there too. There are educational literary journals that are in magazine form. 

Matt: Right. 

Lauren: There are technical reference guides that are magazines in the sense that they come out as a subscription frequency and not necessarily as books or something like that. 

Matt: Yeah. 

Lauren: So there are a lot of other things that we're talking about under this umbrella of magazine. 

Matt: Actually, that's a good point. Magazines as traditionally or historically referenced, you would think of things like US Weekly, whatever, Time, People, Cosmopolitan, and some of the others.

But what's happening in resurgence right now are more of the niche. 

Lauren: Look at you. 

Matt: Just kidding. More of the niche publications, things that focused on very specific topics, crafts, trades, collectibles, tech things, like you said. They're now what you see in, if you go in a Barnes & Noble or an indie bookstore and you go to the magazine rack, they typically have a little thicker paperweight, a little thicker cover. Maybe they only come out quarterly or every two months or something like that. It's a different type of magazine per se. So when we talk about magazines throughout this episode, we're not necessarily referring to those ones that are, right there by the checkout line in the grocery store every month. They did survive the print winter. But it's because they're such a cheaply produced periodical that typically has a very target demographic for news or women's health or something like that, that it's a slightly different conversation. This conversation is around more of those niche magazines – 

Lauren: Yeah.

Matt: – that tend to focus on very specific topics, hobbies, genres, things like that. One of the things I think that has also helped magazines really come back into the spotlight is not only for all of those magazine companies that existed that kind of survived and are still here, but even some of the newer ones that have cropped up over the years. The way, like we talked about, that typically magazine distribution works is you're ordering tens of thousands of copies for every issue ahead of time, offset print, and then they're going to the retailers and the subscribers. If you had an issue that came out eight months ago, once all of those print issues are gone – there's no more in the warehouse, there's no more in your store room, whatever that might be. If you wanted to sell more print copies of it, traditionally you'd have to do another run of that issue. Nobody wants to do another run of 5,000, 10,000, a short run of an older issue if they're not certain they can sell all of those. Print-on-demand became the perfect de facto for that. All back issues now can be switched over to a POD replenishment model. And a lot of the relationships we have and are forming with large magazine distributors and companies with Lulu right now is exactly for that. They're testing and piloting POD replenishment programs for back issues. They're doing hybrid right now where they can do the newest issue in offset and get that out to the subscribers. And the minute those are gone, they've forecasted just the right amount, once they're done with those, they switch that issue over to a POD replenishment model, whereby anytime somebody wants to order it off the site, it's just printed on-demand and shipped out to the customer. And that way they don't have to keep thousands and thousands of back issues in a warehouse and pay for that overhead and pay for somebody to pick and pack them and do all of that stuff just for some back issues that might sell a couple units per month, if you're lucky.

Lauren: Which isn't only relevant and helpful for customers and subscribers and stuff, but also for the companies themselves.

Matt: That’s right. 

Lauren: Especially if you're – I mean, obviously these larger companies, this may or may not be helpful to them, but some smaller, independent magazines. If you find yourself in a situation where you're like, hey, I'd love to have a couple of samples on hand that I could bring to an event or show to a potential new client –

Matt: Yup.

Lauren: – or partner or something, but I can't find my back issues. Or the ones that I have are so old that they're falling apart or whatever, that's not a problem anymore. You can just immediately run off a single print copy and have a brand new, freshly printed copy to send to somebody. And there is absolutely demand for these things. There has been, for as far back as I can remember, this is not really a new concept. We've seen people do facsimile prints of magazines – 

Matt: Yes.

Lauren: – for years. Where people will take old out of print issues from MAD magazines from the seventies – 

Matt: Yeah. 

Lauren: – and do stuff like that. This is not a new concept. It's just trying to make it more readily available. And you'll get a higher quality product instead of somebody's scan of a photocopy of a library edition – 

Matt: Yeah. 

Lauren: – that was handled by a dozen people before you got your hands on it.

Matt: Although, just to be clear, we're not condoning any type of IP infringement – 

Lauren: No. 

Matt: – copyright issues, or plagiarism of any sort. 

Lauren: No, absolutely not. 

Matt: But you're a hundred percent correct for brands specifically, them doing that themselves. We're working with a brand right now, the magazine itself started in the seventies. They certainly don't have issues from the seventies sitting around, but there are a lot of people that want to get their hands –

Lauren: Yeah.

Matt: – on those older issues. They had gone through a project where they digitized a lot of those older issues, and now they can just convert them into actual printable files and they can run them through Lulu print-on-demand, so they're able to sell those issues that originally came out in the seventies, eighties, and nineties.

Lauren: Yeah. And to the point of like, okay, they digitized them already, so these are already accessible to people. Why wouldn't they just wanna… Like they can just download those PDFs. They don't need print issues of them. That's a you thing. Maybe you don't need print things.

Matt: Well. 

Lauren: I think Matt and I have made ourselves very clear the about – 

Matt: But also the idea that you would want a PDF of a magazine you just download and printed at home or something – 

Lauren: Right? 

Matt: – or like, I don't know. That's just not me. I don't – 

Lauren: No. No. I mean, definitely not. And you and I have both made our stance on… Whether it's collectibles or print media in general. Like, we're both very old school when it comes to that. And I stand by that. But I think that there's not enough appreciation for the idea of like, just give people the option. You making a print edition available, of a magazine – 

Matt: Doesn't cost you anything. 

Lauren: Doesn't cost you anything. It's just giving people the option. If nobody chooses, if one person chooses to order it, great. That one person's gonna be really happy. 

Matt: Yeah. And maybe they'll go tell friends who will – 

Lauren: Yeah. 

Matt: But again, it didn't cost you anything up front. 

Lauren: Right. 

Matt: To do that, yeah. 

Lauren: Right. Which is gonna lead us to the idea of people that are already–companies, brands, creators–that are already creating digital versions of magazines.

Matt: Right. 

Lauren: Why not consider offering a print version of it? Especially if you are doing something – depending on how you're, designing it, how you're creating it. If your digital edition of a magazine that you're creating is already like a US letter PDF format, how much different would it be to stick a cover on it and make a print version available?

Matt: Yeah, I mean, and even a lot of the ones, organizations that we're working with right now especially ones that have been around for a long time, there's some very distinct format sizes. US letter obviously being one of them. There's an A4 size, which is very popular among magazines right now. We already do that. It's, you're not reinventing the wheel here. 

Lauren: Right. 

Matt: I think is the point. That's really good. And then, magazines, historically, for a lot of them, they were always saddle stitch with the staples, similar to like, comic books. But now you're seeing a lot of nicer ones where if you can get content of thirty-two pages or more in your magazine, you can actually have them perfect bound like most of the samples we have with us in the studio right now. 

Lauren: Yeah. 

Matt: It just gives it a little bit of a nicer feel, a little more quality look, and quite frankly, it'll last longer. You have a magazine for a long time, after a while the pages kind of start to pull away from the staples and the saddle stitching. So, if you can get your magazine up to 32 pages or more, it can now be perfect bound and have a little nicer feel and a little thicker cover stock. So that's always fun too. 

Lauren: And if you can't, that's okay too. Saddle stitch –

Matt: Yeah. 

Lauren: – is a fine option if it's under thirty-two pages. It also means that you don't have to worry about design details on the spine. Which you don't need on a magazine.

Matt: I don't think it’s necessary. 

Lauren: No. 

Matt: Yeah. 

Lauren: No, there's one, I mean, it's nice if you have, like one of them has the title, volume number, and the date, the publication date. That's nice if you've got a whole bunch of them – 

Matt: Yeah.

Lauren: – lined up on display, but not necessary. 

Matt: Yeah. 

Lauren: So it's a pretty low lift design effort to – 

Matt: Yeah. 

Lauren: – create a cover for these. And if your interior files are already pretty much aligned with what print should look like anyway. Just try it out. 

Matt: Well, and again, it depends on what you're using it for, right? If you're creating a traditional magazine where you are doing volumes, numbers, things like that, then yeah, it's fun to be able to put that on the spine for people who collect them or just, things like that. But if you're using it, again, for something a little more like a catalog or a travel planner or any of those other uses, it's not always necessary to have something on that spine. It just doesn't matter, so.  

Lauren: Yeah. 

Matt: It really depends on what you're using them for. 

[16:49] - How creators are selling and fulfilling print magazine subscriptions

Matt: We've talked a little bit about magazines as a product type, how they're having this resurgence right now, and some of the benefits to them and some of the ways to actually create them and the technology that goes into it. But let's talk a little bit about how people actually go about offering and selling. Who's using these and what format and or, situations are magazines becoming a thing? 

Lauren: Yeah, so there's a couple of different kind of scenarios, I think, that makes sense. And I will actually say that all of these that I'm about to say or, that that we are about to talk about, I've talked to people recently that are in this situation. So none of these are, are like out of the box ideas for how magazines or print, uh, digital. Oh my gosh. What's wrong with me?

Matt: How much time do you got? This is only like a forty-five minute podcast.

Lauren: Okay. 

Matt: We could do a five part series on what's wrong with you.

Lauren: That – that'll be how we start 2026. 

Matt: Oh my God. 

Lauren: A six part introspective deep dive into what's wrong with Lauren. 

Matt: That'll be the whole year. 

Lauren: Everything that we're gonna talk about here are real world examples. These are all people that we've talked to and talked to recently that find themselves in these situations. So I talked to somebody recently who has a Patreon group that she's already creating a digital magazine, one tier of her Patreon gets a monthly digital download –

Matt: Okay. 

Lauren: – of this magazine. And I said to her, okay. How much of a lift would it be for you to add another tier on top of that? That was just a slightly higher price point and they get a print issue instead of, or a digital issue. 

Matt: Or a bundle.  

Lauren: Or maybe quarterly, you'll get one print of all three digital issues all printed into one, just a quarterly bundle instead of whatever. 

Matt: Yeah. We talked about this when we talked about comic books at one point, where I used to read Batman comic books all the time, but I would hate to get the – 

Lauren: Yep. 

Matt: – weekly and monthly ones that were just, ten pages, thin paper, like a couple bucks. I would wait because it'd always take about fifteen to twenty of those and put them into one–similar to this, like just a perfect bound paperback –  

Lauren: Yeah. 

Matt: – volume of the last ten. And that's what I would wait for, and I always buy it that way. So this idea that you could take a quarter's worth of digital magazines, bind them into an actual print magazine and offer that up to your top tier of Patreon subscriber, or whatever.

Lauren: Yeah. 

Matt: Is a pretty cool idea. 

Lauren: Or the opposite. Maybe you have some subscribers that are just regular subscribers, that they get your digital issue or print issue, whatever, however you're distributing it, however often that you do it. And then you step it up and offer publicly, hey subscribers get early access to this stuff, cause they get it before everybody. But if you are not a subscriber, every quarter will make a print issue that is a collection of these altogether and you can buy those. But if you want to get them monthly instead of quarterly. You can subscribe. 

Matt: Yeah. 

Lauren: And then also, I think, I was also talking to somebody recently who as part of an email series, the last email had a digital download that was like everything that had been included in the emails up to this point. And I said, okay, what about, a print version of that? 

Matt: Yeah. 

Lauren: And that's something that maybe that's not content that is enough for a book, but it could be the perfect size for a magazine. 

Matt: Yeah, no, I like that. 

Lauren: Of course, then you're gonna have to solve the problem of how do you deliver this content to people?

Matt: Well, I mean, it's – 

Lauren: Not that hard, is it? 

Matt: No. It's easily solvable. 

Lauren: Yeah. 

Matt: If you've already got a magazine and you already have subscribers. This is an easy one as well. It's a pretty easy cutover. We talked about this a little bit already. The idea that you would be able to get your business to a state where you're not putting out a bunch of money upfront and ordering offset, thousands of copies and then warehousing and having those carrying costs and some of those other things. I think that's really the appeal. If you do have a magazine already and you’re offering print. I mean, obviously there's some out there already that are just digital. And like you said, it's very, very easy at this point to offer print if you've already got a digital version. If you're already doing print, there are obviously ways to cut your cost there and free up working capital. I think that the subscription model itself, whether it's through something like Patreon or some of those other tools and platforms or, through email, which is great I know there's email services like Kit that now have incorporated ecommerce into the email platform itself. So you literally can sell right from that email and download essentially or have delivered. And then again, there are platforms and software that enable magazines themselves, magazine companies, to manage their subscriber base. But if you're not using something like that and you are doing a magazine or interested in doing one, you can use our order import tool to deliver those things, like Lauren was just asking about. If you've got, let's say a Patreon community and every month you know you're gonna have. A hundred to five hundred people that you've gotta ship a magazine to. You can literally just upload a CSV file of all of those people, their addresses and the issue, number of the magazine itself into your Lulu account. And we'll print and ship every single one of those line items – 

Lauren: Yep. 

Matt: – off that CSV file. So it's literally just upload one file and we do all the work. You don't even have to have nice software that helps you deliver magazines all over the world. Things like that. There are tools that already exist, some that we've created where you can just, if you want to experiment with this, it's very easy to give it a try. 

Lauren: Yeah, absolutely. And then of course, if you're talking more about offering like back issues or out of print issues – 

Matt: Right. 

Lauren: – or something like that, that's just you're treating that like a regular book product. 

Matt: Yep. Yeah. 

Lauren: Whether you're selling it direct from your site or hosting it on the Lulu bookstore, you just send people directly and they buy it at their leisure and have it printed and shipped straight to them. 

Matt: Yeah. It's really easy too, if you're using like Shopify or something like that. Where you're already creating a product page or a product for every magazine issue. Whether or not you're holding physical inventory behind the scenes… Nobody cares, nobody knows. So the minute they click to buy that issue, if it's print-on-demand, especially through us, that order's coming to us and we're gonna print it and ship it. It's all white labeled from your magazine brand, so they don't even know, they don't have to know that it's Lulu.

Lauren: Yeah. 

Matt: That's the beauty of white labeling. But again if you're using Shopify or Wix or WooCommerce or one of these ecommerce platforms, nobody knows if you're holding inventory or printing it as it's ordered, and they don't care as long as they can order the magazine they want and get it in the mail. 

Lauren: That's also a nice way that you can…a nice option for bundling issues. 

Matt: Yeah. 

Lauren: If you wanna do that. So if you wanted to say like, buy every issue from 2025, here's a bundle of them. They're still gonna print separately. 

Matt: Offer it as a –

Lauren: Yeah. 

Matt: – as a discount. 

Lauren: But yeah, that's something you can do.

Matt: Well, you could set it up as a bundle product, yes. 

Lauren: Yeah. 

Matt: But we would print them all and then ship them at one time. 

Lauren: Yep.  

Matt: Yeah. 

Lauren: Yeah. 

Matt: So they would still come also as a, as a bundle of–yeah – 

Lauren: Yeah. 

Matt: No, that's, that's a really cool idea too. 

[23:49] - What types of magazine products are creators publishing? 

Matt: Some of the people that we see using magazines, a lot of the creators that we see using this format right now, they range anywhere from people who are technical writers, app developers all the way over to, literally artists and photographers and creators who are doing extremely art-based types of content. We have a client that's been with us for a long time called Mob Magazine and they do a really cool fashion-based magazine. And they also help other people publish within that fashion industry or whatever it might be. So there's all different ranges and types. We've even seen instances where somebody of a more technical nature, a brand, has created this magazine within the industry of consumer electronics. And then what they do is they create helpful articles and things like that in their own, branded magazine. And then they send that out to businesses within their industry every quarter. It essentially ends up acting as like, twofold. It positions them as thought leaders in that space, as experts. And then secondarily acts as a lead magnet for them. So that when those businesses find themselves in the market, or have a need for what that brand offers, the first thing they're gonna think about is that brand. Because they're used to getting that content in the mail from them and looking at it as a very trusted resource. So.

Lauren: Yeah. 

Matt: It's not just confined to artists or photographers or car magazines, things like that. You can literally use this for anything. 

Lauren: I think there's also just a lot of–not necessarily one off opportunities. I don't wanna put it that way. But like, think about how many events that we go to that the event has a daily magazine or an event, like a full event magazine. Where it's like the first day you get there you're given a booklet that's like, here's everything you need to know. It's got the schedule, it's got the complete list of sessions and who's speaking, a vendor list, sponsors can buy ad space in it. It's got all kind of stuff like that. London Book Fair does a daily one. New York Comic Con. That was always, I have so many of them, that was always one of my like, first things that I would make sure that I would grab. I'm pretty sure BEA and BookCon used to do them too, where they would have a daily and overall event guide – 

Matt: So –

Lauren: – magazine. 

Matt: So those were actually done–London, Frankfurt, all the major book fairs–those are actually done by Publishers Weekly – 

Lauren: Oh that checks out. 

Matt: – or Publishing Perspectives.

Lauren: Yeah. 

Matt: They do that in conjunction with the fair, but it's the same concept, yes. 

Lauren: Right. 

Matt: It's a daily magazine, laid out, about the fair, what's going on. Advertisements are in it, articles are in it 100%. 

Lauren: Yeah. 

Matt: And the same for BEA, yeah. 

Lauren: Yeah. But I think there are a lot of non-publishing events – 

Matt: That's right.

Lauren: – tThat do the same thing 

Matt: And should. 

Lauren: And should, absolutely. If you're going to a trade show, if you are somebody that is a sponsor at a trade show or a vendor at a trade show, and you have the opportunity to provide something like a catalog or a magazine that you can bring in. Whether it's to give out to people there, or maybe you wanna say like, I'll be the sponsor producing this magazine for the event. Or pitch that as an idea, something like that. I think there are a lot of opportunities that aren't necessarily subscription-based magazines, but still opportunities to use this product type.

Matt: The beauty of that one for events, and I don't think a lot of people think about this enough. Justin, if you're listening, this is an idea for you, by the way. If you're doing a magazine, or even an expanded notebook that's more of a magazine slash notebook, for your event. This is a great way to bring in local advertisers and sponsors. Normally, when you're doing an event, it's really hard to get local businesses to sponsor or advertise because often what you're asking for is either sponsorship money or if they're a restaurant you're asking for food or discounts or things like – but it's a lot easier if you're creating a magazine for your conference or trade show whereby you can highlight local businesses, right? Local restaurants or places where people might want to frequent while they're at the conference. 

Lauren: Yep. 

Matt: At the event, and other types of businesses, it's a lot easier to get them to sponsor and spend some money to get a little advertisement or a short little advertorial write up in your magazine. Your conference magazine. But I don't see very many people doing that. If it's a one day trade show, like I get it, but these days you're talking anywhere from three to five days for the big ones, and I think that's a missed opportunity. 

Lauren: Absolutely. When we're talking about magazines, we were already saying earlier the difference between the perfect bound paperbacks, which have to be 32, 32 pages is the minimum page count on them. And if you're going smaller than that, you're gonna do a saddle stitch. I guess technically you could do a coil bound if you really wanted to, but I wouldn't call it a magazine at that point. These are lower lift to create than books are in a lot of way and like – a lot of ways? 

Matt: A lot of ways, 

Lauren: A lot of ways. A lot of people like, they'll picture a magazine and they'll immediately go like, oh. Full page images full design layout. I need to be an InDesign expert in order to create this. There's a lot of like, heavy formatting involved and stuff like that. And it can be, absolutely, you can create some really, really beautiful collectible magazines, but you don't have to do that. You can also make just like a very – 

Matt: yeah, 

Lauren: – simple, clean, formatted, straightforward magazine that is a lot easier to get done quickly than a book might be. 

Matt: Yeah. And I've even opened and read some that were literally pure chaos. 

Lauren: Yeah. 

Matt: On purpose though. 

Lauren: Yes. 

Matt: Like, so there's a couple different types of like music magazines where even the last trip to Powells, I picked one up and opened it up and on purpose, they made it look like a really old school, like zine. Like a music zine – 

That’s so fun. 

Even though it was clearly newer and produced on good papers, but you open it up and it's somewhat chaotic. It has that look, like you've just got, you know, blocks of text and like there really is no, I think, set template or formula to follow and it's very easy to create a magazine for the most part. Again, if you're gonna go for a high-end fashion magazine or a, a catalog of sorts where there's a lot of laying out of text and images and things like that. Yes, it can be a little more time consuming for sure. But in general, these are, you're right, very low lift to create and again, carry a lot of different use case scenarios. 

Lauren: Yeah. I think especially if you're doing something that is technical or referential. So if it is something that is, this is your reference guide to an event, or if it is something that…this is your reference guide to the latest edition of this editing software or whatever. Those things change constantly. They change constantly. I'm trying to teach myself how to use Adobe Premiere right now to streamline my workflow on editing these podcast episodes. And I will look up videos for how to do something that are three months old and they're already outdated. Like that's, I mean, that's crazy. And it's not the, it's not the video creator's fault. They're trying to keep up with this stuff as fast as possible. But if you work in an industry where having reference guides is helpful and necessary, but the content gets updated frequently. Something like a just very straightforward catalog magazine guide, something like that is a lot easier to update on the fly and just make those updates, make those changes, reprint it, and now that new version is available, that new issue is available.

Matt: Yeah. I like that we're seeing creative uses of this product too. 

Lauren: Yes. 

Matt: Our friend Lynette at Limelight, she recently put together a catalog of all the titles that her publishing company has produced so far. All of her authors have a little space in here. Their books, and this is really great, for a number of reasons, but Lynette can now use this as not only a sales tool to sell more books for her authors. But it's also a sales tool for her publishing company.

So this was a really great use of it as well. And it's kind of a mix of technical, educational, and visual. So obviously there's lots of images of books and book covers and things like that. And then some of the authors. But there's also, there's a lot of text and education here around the authors themselves, the books themselves, and even the publishing process with her company.

So this was also a really good use of that. And I think this is a, a really good example of using a magazine product in a way to further your business efforts. Once it's done, it's done. And this is a great piece of sales collateral that's really gonna set your business apart from somebody else's.

If Lynette goes to a publishing trade show and she has these at her booth, or whenever she has a meeting with a large publishing company or distribution house, or even retailer, Barnes & Noble or somebody, and she's able to hand them this instead of just a pamphlet or a URL and say – 

Lauren: Yeah. 

Matt: – you know, here's all my titles, go check them. This carries way more weight to it, literally and figuratively. 

Lauren: Well, this also–there might not exist one single space online that has the complete body of your work. If you're looking for a way to catalog your brand or show off like what you can do, what people have done with you, whatever it is. Lynette's website has a lot of her content on it. 

Matt: Sure. 

Lauren: But not all of it. 

Matt: Probably not. 

Lauren: Not every single author that she's ever published in one like sleek, unique space right Matt: there. Yeah. 

Lauren: But this is a way for her to do that. 

Matt: Yeah. 

Lauren: And this is a way for her to have that all together. If you're somebody who has worked with a bunch of different brands or a bunch of different creators, and you don't have a way to be like, oh, you can check out my blog post over here, and my blog post over here, my blog post over here. This is a way. 

Matt: if you're listening and thinking, yeah, okay, catalogs, there's nothing new about that.

You're right, to a degree. The idea that you're treating catalogs a little more as a magazine product or style is a newer thing. The beauty though, of doing it in a print-on-demand scenario… Yes there's a lot of trade shows where exhibitors, brands, businesses are giving out catalogs for their products. But there's also a lot of them that waste thousands, if not tens of thousands of dollars every year because they have these catalogs printed up ahead of the time. They know they've got four trade shows they're doing that year, so they get them printed in bulk. And then what often happens is after the first trade show, something changes in their industry. There's a new compliance law or something that comes down. And unfortunately that means they need to change a bunch of stuff in that catalog because the products need to change. Now, whatever's left of those catalogs, the 5,000, 10,000, whatever, those all have to be pulped, recycled, scrapped. With print-on-demand you just literally go into that file, update what needs to be updated, and then you, you have the most current version and you can print however many copies you need and take them to your trade show or send them to your clients or prospective clients. So there's a lot of time and money and effort to be saved in switching over to that print-on-demand model as well.

Lauren: I think there's also a level of customization in there that's really cool. We talked about this a little bit in the last episode when we were talking about creating a custom landing page from specific events. 

Matt: Yeah. 

Lauren: So if you're driving traffic like from a specific event and you want to reference that in the landing page that you're sending people to, you can do that with this product type as well. Where if you, like in the example Matt just gave, where a brand knows they have four trade shows to go to in a year. And they're gonna create more or less the same piece of content for all four of those shows. 

Matt: The core content.

Lauren: The core content's – 

Matt: Yeah. 

Lauren: – gonna be the same, but maybe they'll put a unique cover – 

Matt: Yeah.

Lauren: – on each event. Or maybe they'll put, there will be like an intro or some kind of branded content at the beginning of it that is specific to the event that they're attending. 

Matt: Yeah. 

Lauren: This is a really easy way to just give it a little extra custom touch. That again, at the end of it, you're not left with like, well now I've got a print run of a thousand copies of these and I gave out a hundred of them at the event. Now I have 900 to destroy and waste. 

Matt: Yeah. 

Lauren: Yeah. 

[35:45] - Considering long-term industry trends with print magazines

Matt: I think we kind of bounced around a little bit. 

Lauren: Yeah, we did. It's okay. 

Matt: I think to sum it all up, magazines as a product type and again, not thinking about magazines as those things that you see at the checkout line in the grocery store. We're talking about typically magazines that focus a little more tightly on a specific niche, genre, product type industry, whatever that might be. The resurgence that's happening right now is happening for a reason. The technology has gotten better, the print quality has gotten better, the pricing has gotten better, and most importantly the ability to customize and deliver these to your target audience in the way that you need to has gotten lightyears better. You couple that with the fact that there's a certain nostalgia that's carried for magazines. A lot of the bigger brands are now able to take those old back issues, digitize them, with print-on-demand be able to sell those as one-offs as they're ordered and not have to carry the cost of ordering 5,000 copies of a 1974 issue of, whatever surfer magazine that they may or may not sell all those copies. We're seeing a lot of really cool things happen. We're seeing people use them for a lot of different purposes, right? They're using them for trade shows, they're using them for product catalogs. They're using them just to further their craft or their brand or their message. We've got really cool examples where people are using them for travel guides, things like that. So I personally am excited about all the cool magazine products we're seeing. I love to see the new ones come through. I love to see the different creative ways people are using them. I don't know, I just, I felt like we needed to do an episode on this and talk about it. I don't think it's getting enough fanfare, but it's definitely getting a lot and we really like what we're seeing and I think we're seeing more of these happen across a spectrum of industries. So…I don't know. I like it. 

Lauren: Yeah, that's important to acknowledge, we didn't come up with this episode topic because we were like, oh, wouldn't it be fun to try to convince people to bring magazines back? I don't think I've, I don't think we have that much influence. We wanted to talk about this because this is a trend that we're seeing and it's cool. I think it's always exciting to see new creative ways that people are taking something that already exists and finding new ways to use it, to make it work for them, to make it more accessible. Matt was starting to say that earlier, that is something that I think is important to acknowledge in this. Magazines, catalogs, things like that, they're not new, but the accessibility of them is. The idea that the average person could just print a magazine right now is, that's still something that a lot of people haven't really had access to ever. 

Matt: Yeah. 

Lauren: So the idea that the average person can just go ahead and be like, yeah, sure. I think this would be a cool asset for my brand, whether it's a product that I'm selling or something that I'm using as a lead magnet or something that I'm using as sample content or whatever, like… I think that's cool. And I think it's exciting to see people continue to use things like this.

Matt: Yeah. 

Lauren: And I'm excited to see events that we're going to in the next six months to a year, excited to see if there's more of those showing up there. Maybe some of the people that I talked to recently about introducing print magazines into their digital content, see if any of them do that. I'm watching.

Matt: Well, that was part of it too, at the recording of this episode. I'm just two weeks back from Frankfurt Book Fair. 

Lauren: Yeah. 

Matt: But in planning for Frankfurt Book Fair and in, reaching out to a lot of different perspective new clients, people that I wanted to talk to, other publishing companies and organizations that were gonna be there, I got a lot of responses back where people were like, well, I'd be interested in talking to you if you guys can do our magazine. If you can help us switch our magazine over to print-on-demand. Normally that's not the case. Like last year in heading to Frankfurt, or even London Book Fair, I can't recall one person, one organization, one publisher saying, yeah, let's talk if you can do our magazines. And then this year heading to Frankfurt, I had three or four of them and I was like, wow, okay. It's one thing to see it at the level that we see it with individual creators and their projects coming through and it's okay, this is cool and we're seeing it out there, in our circles and whatever. But when industry starts doing it. And some of these organizations that I had conversations with were very large organizations. And so when that's happening, that's when it was like, oh, okay. It's really catching on. 

Lauren: Yeah. 

Matt: Like, people are really looking to print-on-demand to really boost their magazine products and magazine sales. And then couple that with the way people are creatively using the product, I think that's what led us ultimately to go, we should probably talk about this because I don't think – this isn't like Labubus, it's not a fad that's gonna go away here soon. I think magazines are gonna stay for a while. I'm happy to see that though. 

Lauren: I think in general it's important to remember that something like a magazine stands the test of time long term. We like to look at industry trends as short term things, sometimes I think we get too like… Seeing the trees and not the forest when it comes to stuff like this. We’ll be like, oh, there's been a steady decline in print magazines in the last decade, but magazines have existed for way longer than a decade. 

Matt: Sure. 

Lauren: Magazines, print magazines have existed for pretty much as long as print has existed.

Matt: Yeah. 

Lauren: And just because they saw a decline last year does not mean that they're going anywhere, or that they're not gonna go back up again. Not last year, last decade. 

Matt: Yeah. I mean, and again, it's, I think it's one of those things that just like vinyl records or special edition print books or things like that. Yeah. The popularity in terms of volume and widespread public adoption will wax and wane, but there'll always be that undercurrent of like just steady. People that always want magazine – 

Lauren: Yeah 

Matt: – magazine content. So you know, again, take it for what it's worth and use it for how you can, or if you can't. But I don't know, I just thought it was worth talking about. 

[41:41] - Wrap Up

Lauren: I didn't, I was immediately on board when you said it. You were like, you wanna talk about this? And I said, yeah, let's do it. So I don't disagree. 

Matt: I think you're usually on board anytime I suggest a topic and you don't have to –

Lauren: Actually, that's –

Matt: – figure one out.

Lauren: That's true. That's very true. Although sometimes you suggest topics and I go…okay. And then go back to my desk and start Googling. This was not one, this was one that I was like, yeah, let's talk about magazines. I could put that outline together. Sounds pretty good. 

Matt: Yeah. Well, if you did listen to this entire episode and you still think it was a waste of your time, email us. Let us know. 

Lauren: Yeah. 

Matt: We'll send you a funny but heartfelt apology. Otherwise. 

Lauren: Yes.  

Matt: Hit the like button, subscribe. Tell a couple friends, please. 

Lauren: Yeah. 

Matt: About us. If for no other reason, just tell 'em you found some ridiculously stupid podcast and they should go watch it. 

Lauren: Yeah, watch it on YouTube. If you're not watching this and you're listening to it, these episodes are in full on YouTube as well. 

Matt: For what that's worth.

Lauren: Yeah. Pros and cons to that. 

Matt: Yeah.

Lauren: Sometimes. Okay. 

Matt: Okay.  

Lauren: But yeah, check it out. You can leave comments on the YouTube videos. 

Matt: Those are always fun, yeah. 

Lauren: Or you can leave comments on social media. 

Matt: Yeah. 

Lauren: So, yeah, we do have some regular commenters on YouTube and shout out to y'all. 

Matt: Yep. 

Lauren: Trust me. I see you. I know you're there. 

Matt: Alright, well, we'll be back next week.

Lauren: Can't wait. I think it's gonna be a good one next week, actually.

Matt: Alright. 

Lauren: We’ll see. 

Matt: We'll see. 

Lauren: No promises. But until then, thanks for listening 

Matt: Later.